In the nebulous world of SEO optimising your website code is the best starting point for a good and relevant search engine ranking. But how can you ensure your website code is optimised for the search engines?

In my former days as a web developer, maintaining sites to be search engine compliant the one task that occupied the most of our time. Back in the nascent days of SEO we were using basic tools and our own, sometimes, tacit knowledge of SEO to maintain our client sites. But despite the speed that comes with being overly-familiar with a site’s code, ensuring a site was optimised for both search engines and users was the web equivalent of painting the Forth Bridge.

Thankfully nowadays there are hundreds of tools available for small to medium businesses to ensure their sites are optimised for the web. If fact there is a confusingly large array of sites and applications that claim they can get you to “the top position on Google.” Search for SEO on Google and your browser window will be consumed by ads inviting you to see their “amazing results” and promising “Guaranteed Rankings.”

From free trials to hundreds per month these ads offer a dizzying list of promises and testimonials but before you sign up there are a few thing you can do yourself to examine your site’s SEO credentials.

Optimising your site’s code may not directly influence your search result ranking but it will provide your site with the best change at being seen by the largest number of visitors.

Your first step in optimising your site should be www.totalvalidator.com. This site offers a free and powerful service that examines your site and suggests the necessary changes that need to be made to optimise your code for search engines and visitors.

According to the Total Validator site “Search engine robots/spiders are very fussy and will not search or index some or all of a site if they come across invalid HTML. So if you want to be properly listed you need to be sure your HTML is valid” (our links).

Testing your site using Total Validator is straightforward and quick, all you have to do is go to their homepage and enter your site address.

In addition, one of the easiest to use validation tools is, simply called, Html Validator. Html Validator is a simple addon for the Firefox web browser. This addon places a small box at the bottom of your screen that tells you the number and type of errors on the page. It also explains the errors on the site and tells you how to remove them.

These online tools will not correct any errors on your site they will tell you where your site is falling down and how it can be improved.

Terms like ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’ might sound overly technical but they needn’t be. Authoring valid code is simply a matter of practice (and, in my experience is benefited from having a lot of fresh coffee at hand). If you don’t have access to your website or you aren’t comfortable with editing your site’s code then raise your site validation errors with your web-development company or have a look at commissioning a freelance web-developer.

While SEO maintenance may be the task that never ends it is not an entirely thankless job. Valid code and interesting content will benefit your search engine rankings and, in time, deliver greater traffic to your site.